She appreciated the information, but did it help? If she was even right about the dean being poisoned, how was it introduced into his system? Was it in something he ate? And he didn’t die of poisoning, he was stabbed to death. Also, there was the wound on his neck; was it an attempt at a first stab, or something entirely different? Without access to the police information, she might never know.
She sighed deeply, staring off into space. What she wouldn’t give for a gabby police informant right that minute. How convenient for amateur sleuths in novels when someone on the police force happily spilled all the information the amateur happened to need right when they needed it. She was lucky indeed that Wally had told Cissy what little he had, that there was poison in the dean’s system.
The missed call was from Nana. Heart pounding with alarm, she stepped outside of the auditorium into the cold clear air and called the tearoom line. Nana answered and reassured her everything was fine. She was fine. It was just that they had a talk with Thelma Mae and she had information she thought Sophie might want before talking to folks at the college. Sophie listened with amazement to the tale of Thelma Mae’s misadventures in the dorm, and her chat with Tara Mitchells. She could hear Laverne chuckling in the background, the warm throaty sound that had taken her through numerous teen crises, usually accompanied by her godmother’s pat on the back and a this too shall pass.
“I need to find Tara Mitchells to have a talk with her about what she meant by having seen two people together who didn’t fit. I also need to track down the systems engineer, Paul Wechsler. He’s not been in to work today, which could mean anything, I guess. I don’t even know if anyone has seen him since yesterday, when he had that accident outside Auntie Rose’s. I think I’ll pay the registrar another visit, though, when I’m done here.”
They chatted a moment longer and she ended the call, then reentered the auditorium. Practice was still going on; she could hear the squeak of shoes on hardwood, and the coach’s whistle, with some swearing and loud admonitions. She made her way into the gym and watched from the shadows for a while. Coach Donovan was red-faced and yelling much of the time. Mac MacAlister seemed off his game and missed most of the shots he attempted. Sophie knew little about basketball, but it appeared his timing was off. Maybe his mind was somewhere else, or maybe because he was suspended and couldn’t play in games, he didn’t care. The whole team appeared lackluster.
Finally the coach dismissed the players. Sophie wondered if she’d have a chance to talk to Mac about his grade hike, but he stormed from the court with his teammates and she was not about to follow him into the locker room. The coach, however, was another thing entirely. He stormed past her and she followed until they reached his office.
He unlocked the room, stomped in, got a can of root beer from his desk drawer, popped the top and took a long swig.
“Coach Donovan?” she said.
He whirled and glared at her. “Who are you?”
“We’ve met,” she said, striding across the room and holding out her hand. “I’m Sophie Taylor. Jason Murphy’s friend? We met the night of the basketball game at the reception for the alumni donors.”
He looked at her thrust-out hand and back up to her face, but didn’t shake. She pocketed her hand. “What do you want?” he asked and took another long slurp of his drink.
He was a no-bullcrap kind of guy, she assumed. Okay, straightforward, then. “Your star player has been accused of having one of his grades raised to keep him eligible for the team.” Even if he didn’t officially have access to the CMS, he might know a little about how it worked, probably enough to take advantage of a computer left logged on to alter a grade. He might be smarter than he looked. “I don’t know whether he asked someone to do that for him or not, I only know Jason didn’t do it. Do you have any idea who did?”
The perpetual scowl on his face deepened, the grooves bracketing his mouth shadowed and bristly with beard hairs missed during his morning shave. He was as unprepossessing a fellow as she had ever seen, but it was mostly his glower that made him so. “If I did, why would I tell you?”
Her father had told her, during one of their rare talks, that when faced with a combative individual in the business world, his best strategy had always been to disarm him with honesty, and then keep him off balance with rapid questions. Sophie wasn’t sure if she knew how to do that, but it didn’t hurt to try, since she couldn’t think of a single reason why he’d tell her anything otherwise. “Because I can tell it’s getting to you. You need to talk to someone, and I don’t matter; why not tell me? All I want is for Jason to not get in trouble.” She paused, but he stared at her, wordless. Well, at least he hadn’t tossed her out yet. “Coach, did anyone approach you about Mac’s grades?”
“We all knew he needed to get his grades up, but I never asked anyone to cut him any favors. All I said was he needed some remedial help, and could they get him a tutor.”
“Who did you say that to?”
“His adviser, Kimmy. She’s a great gal; really went to bat for Mac.”
Sophie was back to square one, in a sense, because Kimmy could still have been the one who altered the grade. “And no one else?”
“His parents; we discussed it at length. Dean of students, Lilith Klein. She was the one coming down hardest. All I asked her was to cut Mac some slack.” He grimaced and took a swig of root beer, hand on his stomach. “Ha, fat chance. She hates athletics. Hated that Asquith was trying to get them featured more prominently at Cruickshank. She’d like to have mathletes, not athletes.” Even a joke came out growled from Heck Donovan.
From the sounds of it, the coach was the last person who would have wanted to harm Dean Asquith, and she thought it was probably safe to rule him out as the killer. “Was she pressuring Dean Asquith to find out who among the faculty or staff had boosted Mac’s grade?”
He nodded. “Hell, yeah. She was putting on the pressure. She’s all about STEM,” he said, using the acronym for science, technology, engineering and math. “Makes her sick that more money comes to colleges from athletics than from math or science. No one ever bought team color jerseys for mathletic events, did they? I told her to suck it up, buttercup, and she got all red-faced. Mad as hell that I make more than her, probably.”
Sophie took a deep breath, and felt a moment of compassion for Dr. Klein. She also spared a thought wondering how Heck and his wife, Penny, got along. She seemed a firebrand kind of woman, mousy looking but not mousy acting. She was strong-minded and resented Cruickshank. How did they deal?
Sophie was a pragmatist; if the college’s biggest problem was that athletics brought money in, they were doing all right. She was probably vastly oversimplifying the problem and she was sure Jason would have an argument against it, but it wasn’t much of a problem, in her mind. Now that she knew a little more about the coach, she proceeded, altering her methods slightly. She sank down on a hard plastic chair by the door, jamming her hands in her jacket pockets.
“It’s so awful that this is all going on. I don’t know what to make of it. But Jason didn’t do the grade altering; I’ve known him for years, and I’d bet on that! And now with Dean Asquith being murdered right outside my grandmother’s tearoom . . . I don’t know what to think.” She looked up at him as he swigged his root beer. “Coach, who would do such a terrible thing? You were with the group that evening; who do you think did it?”
“I was there, but me and Penny took off early. Not my scene. I only went because Dale made such a big deal out of it and he was good to the athletics department. But I headed home as soon as I could scoot. Needed a beer to wipe out the taste of tea.”
Okay, if that was true he was in the clear. “Who do you really think did the grade altering?” she asked, persisting. Another thing her father had said was, if you didn’t get an answer, keep asking the question in different forms. “Some people are saying the dean was going to make an announcement yeste
rday morning. Who would he have said?”
He looked conflicted and slumped down in his chair behind his desk. “I shouldn’t even be saying. Whoever did it didn’t do me any favors. I thought that maybe Lilith Klein had a hand in it.”
Sophie squinted, wrinkling her nose. “The dean of students? You just said she didn’t care about athletes. She surely wouldn’t want to help Mac by upping his grade.”
He leaned forward and shoved some papers aside, agitated. “Don’t you get it? She could alter his grade, then expose it, get Mac put off the team and make it a major scandal for the athletics department. Like we’re all cheaters or something.” He glanced toward the door and whispered, “I think Dale Asquith was onto her, and that’s why she had him killed.”
It was so far out of left field she truly didn’t know what to say. “But you don’t have any proof of that, right?”
“I know what I think,” he said. He shrugged. “Nah. Not really. Truth to tell, I’d bet Jeanette had him killed. That bitch is as cold as ice.”
And that was it for the coach’s information, such as it was. Every path led to a deceiving and manipulative woman, with no information to back it up but his own supposition. It was a miracle he was married, given his gloomy view of womankind.
Confused and baffled, she left the athletic arena and walked across the campus, hands buried in her pockets, enjoying the breeze and the flutter of golden leaves that drifted along the walkways. Students crisscrossed around her, using the paths or the grass, as they wanted. Most stared down at phones, or were lost in the music streaming through earbuds in their ears, but a few pairs and trios conversed as they walked, heads together, texts in backpacks or bookbags.
From a distance she saw a girl with a shiny sheet of blond hair, wearing a plaid short kilt and knee socks on plump legs. She called out Tara’s name and the girl looked up from her phone. She spotted Sophie and seemed conflicted. Sophie loped across the grass up a hill, reaching the girl near the dorm block.
“Hey, Tara,” Sophie said, by way of greeting. She gasped, catching her breath. “I heard you had a senior run-in last evening.” When the girl looked blank, she said, “Mrs. Earnshaw; you met her when she invaded MacAlister’s dorm room?”
Tara broke into giggles. “She was a hoot! I wish my great-grandmother was half as interesting instead of moaning at me all the time about how all I do is text and that I should do something with my hair, and that no man will ever want me if I don’t lose ten pounds and wipe the smirk off my face.”
“Sounds like my mother,” Sophie said sympathetically. “Mrs. Earnshaw said you mentioned something about seeing two people together who didn’t fit. What did you mean?”
“Oh, that. Right. Nothing important,” she said, her gaze slipping away off to the distance.
She’d come back to that, Sophie thought. “I’ve been trying to find out what’s going on with the investigation into the grade-altering scandal. Have you heard anything?”
She looked troubled. “I don’t know. People are assuming it was Professor Murphy now. I’m so ticked about that. I took the easy way out when I mentioned him, and now I can’t convince people he didn’t do it. It’s like the whole thing has taken on a life of its own.”
“That’s the problem with gossip and innuendo; it does tend to get stuck in people’s head. I get peeved when people say stuff like ‘no smoke without fire.’ Sometimes that’s all it is, smoke puffed into your eyes by someone else with something to hide. Anyway, Tara, you can make it right by helping find out who actually did it.”
“I’ve been trying. But what more can I do? Who do you think I should go after?”
Sophie eyed her. Could the girl be trusted? “Do you plan on nailing someone else to the wall without checking your sources, or retailing gossip and innuendo in the paper?”
“Look, I already apologized. My stupid editor is cranky mad, right. Normally he doesn’t care about anything, but before he died, the dean threatened to shut the paper down if anything like that happened again. I have to come up with something solid, and he’s going to be vetting every article I write for a while.”
So it seemed that Dean Asquith wasn’t behind the story, and perhaps then was not trying to railroad Jason. Sophie shared what the coach had said about Dean Klein, and asked what Tara knew about her.
Tara rolled her eyes. “What an idiot. Dean Klein never did anything, and if he’s implying she killed Dean Asquith, he’s barking up the wrong tree for sure.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s no way she could have done anything. Dean Klein is in a wheelchair.”
Chapter 20
“Oh, okay.” It seemed the coach only brought up Dean Klein’s name as a distraction. “Tara, why don’t you tell me who it was you saw together who didn’t fit?”
“Because it doesn’t matter; I don’t think it’s related.”
“Let me be the judge of that; just tell me!”
But her blue eyes were clouded with doubt and she shook her head. “I don’t want to get the wrong person in trouble this time.”
Great time to grow some caution. “Tara, you can trust me not to blab. Finding a murderer is serious business!”
“I know. You’ve done that twice,” the girl said.
Her reputation came back to haunt her. “Just tell me who it was.”
“Later,” she said, whirling on her heel and striding away. “I’ve got to get to class right now; I’m late.”
Sophie sighed. “Just don’t get in any trouble!”
“I won’t,” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it; it’s nothing!”
Sophie sat down on a bench and texted Jason, telling him she was on campus, and that she had a question. Had he ever walked away from his office and left the door unlocked and was still logged in to the program he used to enter student grades? It was the kind of thing anyone might do, and it could be the easy answer as to who had altered the grade; anyone could have who walked past his office.
However . . . even as she still explored that possibility, she had a sense that this went beyond someone simply sneaking into an office and changing one grade. If she was right, there was a systematic raising of grades among key athletes. Paul Wechsler said that there was a pattern (to the raised grades, it was implied) except for an anomaly. She wondered if that anomaly would tell them anything.
She headed back to the administrative building and entered. The place had quieted down some, and she wandered the halls, which smelled of floor wax and oddly, tuna-fish sandwiches, thinking about her next move. She found the registrar’s office. The main door accessed an outer room with a desk, chairs lined up against the wall, and a coatrack. A couple of jackets hung on it, including one that she recognized as Vince Nomuro’s from Sunday evening. But no tweed duffer cap. Not that that told her anything; hats were the kind of thing you changed for different purposes. The desk had Brenda Fletcher’s name on it, with the ASS. REG. designation that amused Dana so. But Brenda was absent. Sophie tapped on the inner oak door with the gold plate that said REGISTRAR—VINCE NOMURO—MACC. She heard a peremptory “Come in,” and eased it open.
Vince looked up from a stack of paperwork, adjusting his glasses. “Oh, it’s you again.”
It was said in a neutral tone, which seemed to be his only tone. He was very low key, especially given this was her second time interrupting his day. She sat down across the desk from him in a comfortable black-and-chrome chair that had the scent of real leather. His office was spacious, with floor-to-ceiling windows filled with lush tropical plants, and a view beyond of the parking lot. Shelves of pottery lined the wall behind his desk. Above the shelves was an impressive collection of samurai swords, lethal-looking knives with elaborate hilts, and some reproduction art of Japanese swordsmen and archers.
He was a collector. Her attention was especially attracted to a lovely Japanese
Satsuma tea set, golden glazed porcelain, with dragons writhing around the teapot and depicted on the tea bowls surrounding it. He also appeared to collect urns and jars; some were Japanese vases and ginger jars, with ornate enameled designs of dragons and tea ceremonies. One looked like an old Grecian urn, with archers in a chariot chasing a stag on it, but there were a few that looked Egyptian, with processions of stiff figures carrying goodies to a dog-headed god seated on a throne.
It never failed to amaze her the stuff people collected, she thought, as she tried to frame what she was going to say. He watched her, waiting, glancing over at his computer screen from time to time and moving his mouse. “That’s a lovely tea set,” she said to break the ice. “I have a friend who comes from a Japanese family; she gave a talk to my grandmother’s teapot collector group on the tea ceremony of her family’s people. It was fascinating!”
“That is what Julia should be doing at SereniTea,” he said, tapping a pen and turning his computer monitor away from her line of vision. “I think people would enjoy it.”
“You must tell Julia that! My friend SuLinn could help her with it.”
“SuLinn Miller?” he said. “I know her. Her husband is an architect and did some design work for my home. I’m trying to return it to its midcentury-modern floor plan.” He appeared friendlier at the connection.
Interesting. The dean had referenced his renovations, but surely a man of the registrar’s pay level could afford that?
“Is Cruickshank College a good place to work?”
“What an odd question,” he said, frowning across the desk at her.
“I’m trying to get a feel for the place. If Jason is going to be working here awhile, I’ll be at more functions, you know.”
He gave her a slight smile. “It’s a bit like a dysfunctional family, with some infighting and cliques. We’re a normal workplace, I suppose, with all that implies. We have a picnic every summer with our families, and we even do Secret Santa at Christmas, though it’s never much of a secret. I’ve had the same person get my name two years in a row, and she always gets me something she’d like, instead of something I’d like.”
The Grim Steeper Page 21
